Russi

If only we could all be Laird: at the North Shore of Oahu, 1999

15. Laird Hamilton
WATERMAN
Age: 36 Specs: 6-foot-3, 215 pounds
Home: Kauai, Hawaii, and Malibu, California

THE CASE: The Kauai native holds dominion over bodysurfing, bodyboarding, boardsailing, kite surfing, skimboarding—and, of course, the sports he helped invent, airboard surfing and tow-in surfing. As for the latter, in the early 1990s Hamilton and several cohorts began using jet skis to get into Maui's 50-foot waves, but instead of just riding them they'd perform stunts like windsurfers. He cinched his status as a modern Poseidon in 1994 in Endless Summer II, which featured him riding a wave so monumental that it looked to be from another planet. Envious yet? He's also married to volleyball star Gabrielle Reece. Not bad for a guy who says, "My mother never thought I'd see the age of 16.

SECOND OPINION: "Big-wave riding, for 50 years, evolved in an almost plodding way," says Matt Warshaw, author of Maverick's: The Story of Big-Wave Surfing (reviewed on page 146). "Suddenly it's 1993 and Laird's riding three or four levels beyond anybody else, like he was visiting from the future."

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Running out of gas on his jet ski in the open ocean in 1992, when vog—haze and volcano smoke—caused him to veer off course between Maui and the Big Island. The Coast Guard rescued him 12 hours later, none the worse for wear.

WHAT'S NEXT: Learning to golf. "It's a head thing, which makes it interesting, but a little quieter than what I'm used to." —Karen Karbo

16. Louise Hose
GEOLOGIST/CAVER

Four thousand feet below the surface of the earth, in a cold, dank hole that exists on no map, the chances of rescue for a stranded caver are close to zilch. Louise Hose doesn't care. "You take the risks you can handle," says the 48-year-old karst geologist, who once witnessed a partner die when he got trapped and drowned in an underground stream. "You don't allow yourself to break a femur." Her matter-of-fact tone leaves little doubt why her colleagues, working alongside her years ago in a Mexican cave, nicknamed her "Macha."

In 22 years of studying cave-forming rock, Hose has explored more than 230 underground holes, 80 of them virgin passages, and published her findings in periodicals with catchy titles like Chemical Geology: Special Geomicrobiology Issue. "Some go deeper, and some do more dangerous work or more science," says Dave Luckins, a former president of the National Speleological Society who spent ten years on the NSS's board with her, "but few combine these elements and do it with her level of skill."

Hose, a former national-level competitive cyclist, ventured into her first cave in 1970 as a freshman at California State University at Los Angeles. "I grew up in Los Angeles surrounded by people, so I really liked the isolation," she says. To feed her jones for subterranean nooks, she earned a doctorate in geology from Louisiana State University. She's currently digging into the bizarre ecology of Mexico's Cueva de Villa Luz, where a recently discovered microbial colonies live off hydrogen sulfide and fart out sulfuric acid. In addition to stinking to high heaven, the atmosphere is poisonous, so Hose wears a gas mask as she works.

In a field known for its swashbuckling one-upmanship, Hose often arrives first at a site, where she rappels down hundreds of feet of rope with a 70-pound pack and then shimmies through insanely skinny passageways. Her body has been so badly bruised that a doctor once asked her if she was a victim of domestic violence. Nope, she told him, I'm a caver. —Elizabeth Royte